Observe, Collect, Map: A Sensory Data Walkshop

Data visualization does not have to live on screens. This session takes you outside on a data walk through the neighbourhood, using visual ethnography and score-based prompts to notice and record sights, smells, sounds and feelings that usually blur into the background. Back indoors, you will map these observations together and build a shared picture of the local sensory environment.

Designed for beginners, educators and community members who may not see themselves as "data people" but are curious about making data feel more human and local. You will leave with a collective map, a few simple techniques for running your own data walks and a broader sense of what counts as data. The workshop is conducted by Priti Pandurangan, an information experience designer who experiments with data walking and community-focused visualization.

Priti is a creative practitioner working globally across digital humanities, data, and computational futures through research, facilitation, and critical inquiry. Her personal practice explores pluralistic approaches to data and technology, focusing on forms of knowledge and epistemologies that resist quantification while holding space for lived experience, ambiguity, and affect.

She is also a data walker who facilitates data walks in cities around the world, enabling participants to engage with urban environments through situated and embodied interpretations.

Central to her work is how culture is held, transmitted, and reconfigured across contexts and temporalities, and the structures through which it is preserved and interpreted.